


I Know You like an Old Friend

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [27]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 05:25:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6787204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Furiosa is given the War RIg</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Know You like an Old Friend

**Author's Note:**

> I've seen some interesting meta on the hold in the War Rig, but then I looked on the wiki and like...the Rig has a more extensive backstory than all of the Wives combined. It's pretty interesting. 
> 
> http://madmax.wikia.com/wiki/Tatra_T815_%22The_War_Rig%22

Fifty-eight days after Angharad sat down to plan the escape, Furiosa was given the War Rig. Imperator Tiber had died on a run to the Bullet Farm, lost his head to a Buzzard bullet and almost lost the Rig. If he _had_ come back alive, after a run like that, the Immortan would have been the one to take his head, and everyone in the Citadel knew it.

It didn’t dull the excitement that sent jitters through Furiosa’s throat as she left Joe’s chamber, or quell the insidious hope sending up shoots in her chest. She had known for over six thousand days that death was just around the corner, waiting for her with claws outstretched. The skulls on the Rig’s grill grinned up at her, and Furiosa found herself grinning back.

She had been a black-thumb before she was an lancer, a lancer before she was a driver, a driver before she was an Imperator. She had survived everything the Citadel had thrown at her, and the menacing hulk of the War Rig at her command felt like a reward. Furiosa didn’t know what she believed in anymore; it would never be the cultish devotion of the War Boys for her, and she could never do more than abstractly appreciate the V8 that Joe claimed was his gift to the half-lives. The eternity of the engine in place of their years.

She didn’t believe in anything anymore, but looking at the War Rig and knowing it was _hers_ … Furiosa could believe in that.

 

Between the Rig and her continued summons to Vault duty, Furiosa rarely had time for her crew these days. She wanted to know the Rig inside-out before they took it out. She tried not to listen to the Wives and their planning; the Dag learning the alethiometer under Miss Giddy’s instruction, Cheedo shaking her head whenever the raven asked her a question. Toast lectured Angharad on the parts of a gun, made from the torn page of a book. Capable pulling books from a stack, looking for any glimpse of survival that might be found in them.

Once, a very long time ago, Mary JoBassa had taught her daughter to read. Now, Furiosa didn’t think she could so much as pick out individual letters from the faded gold that Capable ran through so easily. 

Two days before her first delivery run to Gastown and the Bullet Farm, Furiosa noticed that the tanker was eight feet shorter than it should have been. Or more properly, that the hollow hold was much shorter than the outside. Even knowing it, she had trouble placing the missing space, stalking up and down the spiked wheels after all but the craziest black thumbs had gone for food and a slab. She knocked her metal fist against the side of the tanker, listening to the echoes. She stole a board and wheeled underneath, rolling slowly and staring up at the hidden belly of her beast. She paced the inside of the hold five times, measuring her footsteps differently, wondering if she was going to have to take a torch to the metal before she figured it out.

And then, with the sun approaching the underside of the dawn horizon, Furiosa knelt down at the forward edge of the tanker; saw the entrance. A sliding metal panel, covered with dirt and dust and on top of that designed not to draw anyone’s notice, and when she pushed it gave way with a friendly sort of grinding. First, she stood up and looked around, making sure there wasn’t another soul in the garage. It was abandoned, but wouldn’t be for long. The early Boys would be rolling in after morning rations, and it was rare for any place in the Garages to be empty for long.

Furiosa pulled herself inside, ignoring the faint smell of long-dried meat. It was pitch-black, but there was a little bit of light from her entryway, where she’d been burning an oil lamp to see her work through the night. It was a moment’s effort to pull herself halfway back out and fetch the lamp, and when she brought it in…

There were four beds built into the curved walls. This easily accounted for the missing space in the hold, and whoever the last people had been, they hadn’t cleaned out very well. The useless remnants of playing cards sat in one corner, scattered like the child’s toy they were. In another, an abandoned leg bone stuck out from the bed, rounded joint large enough to belong to an adult. Furiosa took hold of it with her metal hand, staring around the dusty, hidden space.

She laughed, once. There might be just enough room for five Wives and their daemons. The whole world seemed as ready for Angharad’s escape as she was. The door on the opposite side of the tiny cabin led back into the empty hold of the Rig, though when she closed it from the outside Furiosa could barely see the seams of it. There was no handle from this side of the hidden hole, so she wouldn’t have to worry about War Boys running dawn checks.

Furiosa shook herself, making the lamp in her hand sputter, and let herself out of the hold. She slid the grate between the cab and the Rig shut, wondering what’d come over her. There was nothing she could do for the Wives or their daemons. There was the War Rig, and there was the Vault, and those two things would never intersect.

But the part of her mind that was full of witch’s blood and the Green Place whispered that _she_ was the meeting place between Vault and Wasteland, that _she_ was the one who had survived both. That if she wanted to make it home, there was now a secret place inside her Rig that wanted to bring the Wives with her.


End file.
